Reverse Camera Lens Trick: Macro Photography

By Karl On December 2, 2011 Under Lenses, Tips and Tricks

You’re probably just sitting there at home just wondering on how people take up all of these beautiful close up shots of different things. This is what we call macrophotography, in other words: Close-up photography (why it’s not called microphotography completely puzzles me) This type of photography depends on the details of what we usually don’t look at. Just look at the petals of a flower, what do you see?

What you see here is a plain old flower. The petals may be out of focus and you see some raindrops, and somehow by chance you see that insect right smack-dab in the middle of the shot, and now you want to take a close up picture of the said insect, but your camera lens just can’t focus hard enough to do that. But not to fear! Even with a kit lens you can take a shot up close like:
By using a nifty little trick called: The Reverse Camera Lens trick (Which is for those of us who can’t afford a zoom lens)

First, you need to keep a few things in mind:

You can either use one lens or two lens. Two lenses produces better results in my own opinion. You need to keep both lens held tightly together (using a magical thing I like to call: Duct tape)
The focus needs to be set on manual, since digital pert of the lens will not be registering in this little trick (as you can see, it will be exposed, so the hollow portion of the lens will be showing, while the concave portion of the lens will be facing your SLR.
Keep on eye on the settings. You aren’t on any automatic settings, so you’ll need to keep changing settings for this to work. Just remember: You’re saving money with this stuff, it’s supposed to be harder.
Flash is a no-no. Keep a bright light with you, or use natural light. Flash will either overexpose your picture or might scare the living daylight out of the organism you’re trying to take a picture of.
A tripod is invaluable. You don’t have three hands so having one of these will improve on your stability.
If you didn’t already know, you really are reversing your lens (unscrew it, and hold it to your camera and manually focus everything)

I’m sorry that I couldn’t upload any picture of mine, my dad doesn’t want to empty the full CF cards of our camera and I can’t seem to find the wire or hub to transfer pictures to or from the computer anymore. Anyways, till next time!